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Whenever a new generative language model is released and discussed on Hacker News, there's always the comment that "it's worthless because it doesn't always gen
by minimaxir 5y ago
Whenever a new generative language model is released and discussed on Hacker News, there's always the comment that "it's worthless because it doesn't always generate coherent text" which I've always disliked because it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative.
However, in the case of Copilot, there has to be a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in terms of generated text than creative language models like GPT-2/GPT-3 to use it as a pair programmer where the overhead in working with the model is worth the time saved via the model.
- Barrin92 5y ago> it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative. is that true though? Progress in natural(!) language processing is very iterative, but coding and code correctness is a very precise thing. Both semantically as well as literally. Code that's a 'little bit' wrong technically does not compile, and code that's a 'little bit' wrong semantically might produce catastrophic results. Engineering doesn't become a natural language problem just because you throw a natural language model at it.
- sanxiyn 5y agoNatural language syntax is precise too. It's not like it's personal idiosyncratic preference. People will mostly agree whether something is syntactically correct or incorrect.